


oh well, oh well (we've really done it now)

by arbhorwitch



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Angst, M/M, Reincarnation, kids trying to find themselves in a world that doesn't remember them, one day i'll write something actually fluffy, who knows - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-25
Updated: 2014-04-25
Packaged: 2018-01-20 17:18:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,355
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1518830
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arbhorwitch/pseuds/arbhorwitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eren, Armin, and how time changes very little.</p>
            </blockquote>





	oh well, oh well (we've really done it now)

**Author's Note:**

> this was bound to happen i love this ship so much as in give me platonic eremin give me romantic eremin give me aLL OF IT 
> 
> it was kinda strange not writing levi but ////shrugs

As a boy, he sits in the garden with his parents and digs his fingers deep, deep, deep into the dirt, until the black sticks under his nails and the soft specks stain his hands like tiny aphids.

Flowers: roses and veronicas, lilacs hidden between the spaces of the fence—blues and reds, perennials that smell like his mom’s perfume, and each day he brings a bucket of water and dusts it lightly over the soil and stems. They grow into something beautiful, glistening emeralds and rubies in the middle of the rain season, and he writes it down in a journal that, at the tender age of ten, is made of scribbles and disjointed words that he hopes he’ll still understand when he’s older and wiser and can grow his own garden to show his mom.

She loves the flowers, you see: lets the petals of a rose slip between her fingers, red and dangerous over milk-skin, and he sits in her lap with a smile that makes her cry.

“You’re my sunshine,” she says quietly, tulips in his hair that wilt as spring warms to summer and summer cools into fall, bringing the kind of rain that makes him ache with flu. 

She’s wilting too, you see: bones sharp under the expanse of her milk-skin, and he thinks no, this isn’t right, because she has trouble waking up in the morning and coughs up dying roses in tissues, and his dad is perpetually _sad_ , vigil by her bedside when the days are too short for her to stumble out of bed.

He turns eleven and the night turns cold and dispassionate, and his mom, you see, turns blue, like the violets in his backyard that died months ago with the first snowfall, and he thinks—

…her perfume smells awfully pretty, even though her lungs are a graveyard of dead lilies that rest on an epitaph that reads _a beloved mother and wife, sister, forever remembered_.

Armin understands. His dad, not quite, falls apart in poppies, and his world gets a bit smaller.

***

He finds solace in books, endless _endless_ books that speak of worlds he’s never seen—a wondrous place filled with a beauty untouched, and one day, he hopes to be able to walk among the grasslands of Ireland and the beaches of the south, where the ocean is filled with creatures he’s only seen in documentaries. His grandfather shows him wonderland, an album of photos aged with time; his grandfather tells him _yes, yes, one day, you’ll see!_ and Armin believes him, tends to the small garden of tulips, waters them with a bottle filled in the sink of their tiny apartment. Life hands him a deck of cards that promise him something better than simplicity, he falls in love with the way the universe sleeps in stars and constellations that he draws on the wall of his bedroom with permanent markers and fabric paint. Colours—sixteen shades of flowers and supernovas.

Writes, mostly. A journal in the hands of a boy, smudged ink on crinkled-crumpled paper.  

Fifteen, and he meets a boy that walks through history and his eyes, oh.

***

Eren is a walking hurricane, a breathing disaster that speaks in truths very few can comprehend.

Armin cares about him, really, takes him home on nights where Eren can’t see past his own two feet—not a drop of alcohol in his system, simply sad, a wanderer in a world of ghosts he sees whenever he sleeps. Armin holds his hand and wraps an arm around his waist, keeps him up, keeps him _steady_ , and Eren is beautiful: not in how his hair falls messily over green-gold eyes, but in how he breathes promises into Armin’s neck that remind him of a time he shouldn’t remember.

Eren says, “We know each other,” and Armin laughs, tucks his hair behind his ear and looks up at the night sky. Eren is a fever infecting his system too quick for him to fight.

“We do,” he agrees, smiling grimly, wondering what it’s like to kiss a boy that’s too old for this world. “For about a year now, I think.”

That’s a lie. A year is passive, boring; Armin can recite the months and minutes down to the second-hand on the clock.

“ _No_ , we know each other, I _know_ you.”

“Do you?”

“I know your parents died outside the walls,” and Armin comes up short, trips over the laces of his sneakers, stares at the gravel on the ground that’s been chipped by the weather. Eren groans and throws his arms around Armin’s shoulders, anchoring him—oh well, oh well, worse things have happened so Armin hugs him back and clings to a body that fits his perfectly.

Oh well, oh no. Eren is crying. Armin can’t make sense of this.

(he thinks of flowers and their colours and how pretty red had looked on his mom and how her perfume was sometimes lilacs and sometimes lilies and in the end they were nothing more than chrysanthemums and he’s _lost_.)

“You’re alive,” Eren murmurs, and something breaks in Armin’s chest, snaps the strings that keeps him tethered. Stands precariously on the edge of _this_ , and he wonders, he _wonders_ how many nights Eren has spent alone in the realization that everyone he loves doesn’t remember that he loves them, and he thinks, so many died, yet here they are, and it’s not as easy as planting a garden in his backyard with old soil and tiny seeds.

Armin doesn’t want to remember because it’s a road that he’s known for too long, but he hates that it’s Eren who got stuck with this in the end, and fate is not his friend.

What it’s like to kiss a boy too old for this world: Armin doesn’t have to wonder, because he already knows, deep down, exactly what it’s like, and yet.

He takes Eren home. Tucks him into bed, sets a glass of water on his bedside table. Mikasa sees him out, and he’s happy that their parents are taking care of them this time. A small blessing.

The world is a cruel, beautiful place, and Armin is—lost.

***

See:

Eren tells him stories that are too real to be tales, the two of them sitting on Eren’s bed in the early hours of dawn, buried under soft blankets that smell like cotton and something homely; it’s raining, a cold autumn day that echoes through Armin’s bones, makes him ache with a nostalgia he can’t explain. Eren is a quiet fire here, imagines him as nine and terrified, can’t help but think of how many people have bled out from his hands. He can’t ask, so he doesn’t, settles with sitting in the curve of Eren’s chest, his legs, mapping out invisible scars on his hand and the very real scars on his wrists and thighs. Doesn’t ask, because he can’t. A coward in the barest sense of the word, what it means to be sixteen in a time where sixteen doesn’t equal death and destruction, less about the sadness and more to do with growing up. The line between being a boy and being _more_ , more than the definition of adulthood, so much more than fates and histories.

They never understood, they never had the _chance_.

“I can’t remember names,” Eren admits, tracing planets over the skin of Armin’s chest. “I remember faces. I’m missing some.”

He should apologize. He can’t. Paints the Milky Way on Eren’s kneecap.  

A beat of terrible silence, until: “Do you remember me, Armin?”

Lie, swallow the truth like a bitter pill, but Eren’s had enough of those to last a lifetime. Armin isn’t the same as he used to be, yet he still loves this boy in his entirety, so maybe that’s enough. It has to be, for them.

“I don’t,” he begins in a whisper, feels the freesias choke his throat. “But I know you, Eren. I’ve had dreams too, just not the way you have. I don’t know the people you’re talking about. I know you. And that’s okay.”

He turns then, places the palm of his hand on Eren’s abdomen and leans forward. Eren expects it, waits for it, and Armin’s heart clenches painfully with an overflowing love for this boy—this boy who doesn’t know how to love, and that’s okay, that’s fine, they’re more than the past. Death could never.

Death could never, maybe. So often sad. 

Armin kisses him.

***

They grow from there, in a sense.

Eren has spent too much time locked in a world that doesn’t exist anymore, wakes up screaming some nights, reaching out a hand with a name on his lips that Armin thinks he knows but doesn’t bother trying to recall. They sleep together, cradled in a bed too small for two boys, and nothing defines them better than broken.

Armin is seventeen and wants to travel, find his place beyond a small city; Eren is seventeen and has already seen too much.

“You’ll be fine,” Armin tells him, the night before he’s set to leave. A plane ticket sits in the drawer of his nightstand, Eren sits on the edge of his bed, looking haggard and tired and alone. Armin’s lungs are drowning in regret. “I’ll be home before you know it. You can always come with me.”

“I can’t,” he repeats. An old conversation. Eren is afraid, but Armin is suffocating here, and he wants to grow old with Eren by his side. He’d do anything, anything. “I’ll miss you.”

“I’ll miss you, too,” Armin murmurs, taking a seat next to him, miles between them even now. Eren leans against him, plays with the half-ponytail that Armin tied earlier. “I’ll write to you every day.”

Eren wheezes out a laugh, a painful thing to hear, and says, “Don’t fall in love with someone else.”

“I could never,” Armin starts, stops, kisses him deeply. Reassures, quells the centuries spilling out of Eren’s veins. Breaks away, gasping, muttering _could never, could never_ in the hollow of Eren’s throat until they tumble back on the bed with the sheets rustling beneath them.

“I waited for you,” Eren breathes, closing his eyes and clinging to the back of Armin’s sweater. He’s not crying. It’s easier if Armin doesn’t think about it. “I waited for you for _so long_.”

—the stars are beautiful, really, though they’re nothing compared to the thousand-year-old constellations written on the back of Eren’s neck, where blade had cut bone so deep he still feels it to this day.

***

Years: a passing of time, he supposes, spends more time pouring out his thoughts and memories on parchment with black ink, folding them into an envelope.

Things like the weather (how nice it is out here, cold and bitter but unconditional) and the sights (the ocean is so _beautiful_ , the lakes are ice and the hills, eren, the hills) and if he’s feeling exceptionally sentimental, a bit more heartache (i miss you, eren, did you know? by the way, i love you). Signs his name, moves on, visits the small towns that fill him with a joy he hasn’t felt since he was four and planting sunflowers along the wall of his backyard.

Nineteen and Armin can write books on what he’s experienced, keeps an ancient journal tucked under his pillow every night, vows to give it up when he can promise more than mediocrity to a boy that deserves far more than Armin can give. His glasses slip down his nose and he brushes too-long bangs out of his eyes; the water feels strange on his toes, and he sits on the beach in a sweater that doesn’t belong to him, breathing in a scent that isn’t there—sees the horizon, grey and dull and haunting, and thinks about Eren, of course. Oh well, oh well, what a mess he’s made, but it clears his head. Mostly.

He misses Eren. Has spent the last hundred years missing Eren, he thinks. Homesick. 

Twenty, and he stops running.

***

“Welcome back,” Eren says, eyes alight with excitement; he doesn’t look as exhausted, a fire in his bones that shines through his dark, paper-thin skin, and Armin smiles a bit watery. Eren’s arms are stronger when they wrap around his waist and tug him forward, and Armin doesn’t hesitate to pull him closer, kissing the edge of his jaw and finding solace, not in books, but in the stories he can write with Eren sleeping next to him. The world is a place for both of them, shattered as they are, and the scattered pieces are worth finding if this is what nights spent together mean.

It’s not simple. Nothing is simple, and that’s.

That’s fine.

“Good to be back,” Armin replies happily, genuine, and Eren holds his hand as they leave the airport. People stare; people do little else. They’re happy in this moment, and he couldn’t care less about what others have to say about them. Too long waiting for this moment. Armin loves him, you see. Eren is learning how, all over again; imagine riding a bike without training wheels and whistling in victory when you make it to the end of the driveway without tumbling off the seat.

Snowdrops blossom on the tips of his fingers, and he’s going to plant some tulips on their balcony—he still misses his grandfather, though starting over with Eren a second, third, fourth time will ease the pain, and they’ll make it.

It’s not perfect by any means. Armin has it written on a page in his coat pocket, torn apart by time and consequence, and they are _free_.

“Let’s go home,” Eren declares, squeezing Armin’s hand in his own, and Armin could cry. Smiles instead, staring at the break in the clouds in Eren’s eyes, what it’s like to kiss a boy who was a hurricane.

Less about disaster. More about love. The pursuit of selflessness, a happiness bursting in his ribs at the light shining through.

They’ll make it.

“Okay,” Armin agrees. Stories that will never be published. They are _so much more_. “Okay.”


End file.
